Kasich can't privatize the public's right to know

Editorials

When Ohio Gov.-elect John Kasich visited The Enquirer in September for an endorsement interview, we asked him for his views on openness in government, particularly in light of his proposal to put state development policy in private hands.

Here's what the GOP gubernatorial candidate said:

"I'm not worried about transparency. I'm not going to get hung up on that stuff. If you've got something you want to know, I'll tell you. I'm not here to 'hide the pea.' My bias is toward openness."

Within a day of opening his FixOhioNow.com website, Kasich had received more than 1,500 resumes for public jobs via e-mail to the site.

But if he gets his way, the public will never know who applied, what criteria were used in hiring - or who might have been more qualified choices.

The rationale behind this reasoning: FixOhioNow.com is not a state government site but a private site, paid for by the Kasich-Taylor New Day Committee Inc. Is this how Kasich intends to operate? As a "private" governor?

If this is "transparency," we'd hate to see what opacity looks like in a Kasich administration.

Contrast that to Strickland, whose team released compact discs with job applicants' resumes to the media regularly before he took office. Strickland at least appeared to appreciate the importance of openness.

Jack Greiner, The Enquirer's attorney, believes these job applicants' resumes are public records based on past decisions by the Ohio Supreme Court, which has repeatedly stated that - as Kasich himself put it - the bias must be toward openness.

Yet the Kasich folks flatly say otherwise. "Resumes submitted through the site are not subject to public-record demands," Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said.

For a candidate who ran on bringing plain-speaking common sense to Ohio government, this is uncommon nonsense.

Governing is not an exercise in devising mechanisms to shut out the citizens you purport to represent - and for whom you are working. In short, it's not a game of "hide the pea."

There may be a legal gray area here regarding the private site. That's for courts to decide. But you don't have to be an attorney to understand that well-established precedents toward disclosure are being snubbed - and that the spirit of Ohio's open records laws is clearly being violated.

In one sense, Kasich is being true to his word. During the campaign, he said he would move rapidly to get his economic policies in place. "There's a whole series of things that have to be done quickly," he told The Enquirer. Setting up a quick Web site for hiring was preferable to "a state government system at state government speed," Nichols said.

Fine. We understand how bureaucracies can grind processes to a halt. But that's a separate issue from a flat refusal to release the names of applicants for what will be taxpayer-funded jobs. Saying it's a private site is a dodge, in a sense not unlike when Cincinnati Public Schools used a post office box for superintendent candidates to send resumes to, rationalizing that they didn't have to make them public until they "received" them by taking them out of the box.

That was a crock, and so is this. It's an attempt to hide from the public what the public deserves to see.

We endorsed Kasich in part for his business-friendly policies, believing him better positioned to harness the ingenuity and power of the private sector.

But he ought to know better than this. You can't privatize the public's right to know.

Mr. Kasich, you may not be "worried about transparency," but we sure are.

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Kasich can't privatize the public's right to know

Mere weeks after defeating incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland, the team of Gov.-elect John Kasich has said it won't make the names or resumes of applicants for state jobs public - an outrageous nose-